Odious beliefs

Richard Dawkins once took part in a debate with the distinguished theologian and philosopher Richard Swinburne. The Holocaust, Swinburne suggested, had a positive element because it gave Jews an opportunity to be noble and courageous. Swinburne’s ‘grotesque piece of reasoning’, Dawkins writes in his new book, is ‘damningly typical of the theological mind’, and an attitude that reveals not just the redundancy of religion but also its immorality.

People sometimes say to me, “Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?” And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm.

It’s the devil’s chaplain. Darwin to Hooker: ‘What a book a Devil’s Chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering low & horridly cruel works of Nature!’

Kenan disagrees with Dawkins about religion as abusive to children though. But I in turn disagree with Kenan.

Parents indoctrinate their children with all manner of odious beliefs. That is the nature of parenting. And the nature of growing up is that young people decide for themselves, often rejecting the views of their parents. Dawkins’s argument seems to reveal less about the nature of religion than about his own pessimistic view of the human capacity for change and independent thought.

Well, no, not all parents, not necessarily, and to the extent that they do, that’s not desirable. One could make a similar sort of generalizing reply – parents beat their children, parents abuse their children, parents deny their children education, parents neglect their children. Some do, but when they do the state sometimes intervenes, and that’s a good thing. That’s not to say the state ought to intervene when parents pass on their odious beliefs, it’s just to say that it’s not necessarily desirable or okay or tolerable simply because it happens. Some children reject the views of their parents, but some don’t; the world is full of people who have odious beliefs, and the rest of us have to live with them. That’s not to say we should all zoom around indoctrinating one another and creeping into one another’s basement windows in order to murmur into the ears of one another’s children – it’s just to say the problem is not so easily dismissed.

Kenan’s amusing though.

Dawkins steamrollers over such complexities. The result, ironically, is that he ends up sounding as naive and unworldly as any happy clappy believer. ‘Imagine with John Lennon a world with no religion,’ he writes.

Hmmm I think I’ll start smaller. A world with no SUVs. That will do for a beginning.

129 Responses to “Odious beliefs”

That’s not to say the state ought to intervene when parents pass on their odious beliefs, it’s just to say that it’s not necessarily desirable or okay or tolerable simply because it happens. Some children reject the views of their parents, but some don’t; the world is full of people who have odious beliefs, and the rest of us have to live with them.

That’s fair enough, and there are religious views and religiously based views (notably centering on eternal punishment and such niceties) which I would frown upon teaching children. But to the extent Dawkins is comparing religious education and the like to child abuse, it seems to me he is de facto arguing for such intervention.

(I’m no fan of Swinburne’s, but is the holocaust argument one that Swinburne has actually made or one that Dawkins thinks Swinburne has made?)

the possibility of the Jewish suffering and deaths at the time made possible serious heroic choices for people normally (in consequence often of their own bad choices and the choices of others) too timid to make them (e.g. to harbour the prospective victims), and for people normally too hard-hearted (again as a result of previous bad choices) to make them, e.g. for a concentration camp guard not to obey orders. And they make possible reactions of courage (e.g. by the victims), of compassion, sympathy, penitence, forgiveness, reform, avoidance of repetition, etc., by others (151).

A god who introduces suffering just so that people have an opportunity to exercise compassion is the creator of a pointless game. Oddly, only an absurd universe in which suffering emerges for no divine reason is one where goodness is meaningfull.

Without wanting to get embroiled in the whole indoctrination-as-child-abuse question, religious indoctination is not comparable to other forms of parental indoctrination. The acceptance of a faith involves the explicit renunciation of the tools with which to challenge that faith: a true religious believer is not and cannot be open to dissuasion from his or her views and thus cannot be said to be truly able to make a choice in such matters.

A child raised as a racist, for example, is still in principle open to dissuasion by evidence and experience – his or her beliefs are supposed to be rooted in experiential reality and thus may be disproved. A religious believer, by contrast, has faith in something which is by definition unfalsifiable and thus does not have the option of examining his or her beliefs in the cold light of reality.

Of course, since people are but human the above statements only apply in principle: many of those indoctrinated with non-rational but falsifiable beliefs will never really examine their convictions (and thus will remain bigots or whatever) while many religious believers will never wholly deny the significanc of the evidence of their own eyes and experiences (and thus will question or even lose their faith). This does not change the fact that the qualitative differences in the nature of those beliefs remain.

“Without wanting to get embroiled in the whole indoctrination-as-child-abuse question, religious indoctination is not comparable to other forms of parental indoctrination. The acceptance of a faith involves the explicit renunciation of the tools with which to challenge that faith: a true religious believer is not and cannot be open to dissuasion from his or her views and thus cannot be said to be truly able to make a choice in such matters.”

I’m aware that for people like me whon have had a completely scular upbringing there is a danger of complacency, buty this is nonsense. It is perfectly possible to be brought up within a religion and have highly developed argumentatiove and reasoning faculties. Surely everybody knows people like this. I have, for example, a number of catholic friends who renounced their faith in their early teens, in despite of the opiety of their families. This is because they were able to make reasoned choices about their faith for themselves. Some of their brothers and sistsers came to different conclusions, but not because theye were deprived of all intellecual independence.

Of course religious believers can have ‘highly developed argumentatiove and reasoning faculties’: without that being true there would be no theologians and no apologetics, for a start! My point is that if you are a ‘true believer’, then with regard to your religion you are denied the tools with which to challenge your faith. Your belief is in something not empirically testable, by definition; it is thus not subject to disproof through experience or through rational analysis. Faith equips the believer with a full set of tools for rejecting all arguments contrary to God while simultaneously framing doubt as (a) a sign of weakness and (b) a test of faith (what a double-whammy!).

The Christian faith is really strong on this – look at the story of Job, for example, and you see how suffering seemingly incompatible with the existence of a loving God becomes itself a proof of God through a testing of faith.

Your citation of ‘a number of catholic friends who renounced their faith in their early teens’ does nothing to invalidate my point: I said that ‘many religious believers will never wholly deny the significance of the evidence of their own eyes and experiences (and thus will question or even lose their faith).’

Spot on. Another imbalance is that some parents will indoctrinate their children about, say, the existence of earth spirits, but there’s no massive state support for that. Indoctrinate your kids about the existence of a bit sky fairy, and, wow, look at the number of schools the state will pay them to go to in order to reinforce those parents’ belief in their kid! While the first set of my hypothetical kids here can quite easily grow out of those beliefs, it’s harder for my second cohort. ‘Please, Mr Blair, will you pay me to indoctrinate my kids?’ ‘But of course, Mrs Loony, how much do you want?’

As for Swinburne, I read a couple of his articles in Think magazine two or three years ago when he was trying to convince me of ID. All he succeeded in doing wat to ID himself as someone who ought not to be teaching at a university.

‘Indoctrinate your kids about the existence of a bit sky fairy, and, wow, look at the number of schools the state will pay them to go to in order to reinforce those parents’ belief in their kid! ‘

But the reason that the govt supports faith schools has nothing to do with their attitude towards religion, it is simply because they are far more successful in achieving the usual secular educational goals than equivalent non-faith schools. In other words, child at a faith school is more likely to have the mental apparatus for developing independent critical ideas about religion than a child at a non-faith school. Speaking only of Englnd and not NI, of course.

BBC interviewer John Humphrys asked Rowan Williams about the Problem of Evil. Summary: Q: How come your God willed a world in which cancer kills children and their parents are sad till they die? A: My God may not console them while they are alive, but He has an eternity to make it better after they die.

Curiously, the only mention of Jesus that I recall was to say that he didn’t do miracles in his “home town”. Too many people there remembered him as a tricksy yoof, I wonder?

John M. – the same difference seems to exist in the Netherlands, with pupils at religious schools scoring better, being absent less, etc. than pupils at public schools. Which incidentally leads to non-religious parents sending their kids to religious schools quite often.

Interestingly, the situation is locally reversed: public schools in areas which are otherwise almost exclusively Catholic do better than the surrounding Catholic schools. The same seems to go for Catholic schools in almost exclusively Protestant areas, etc.

Merlijn – I know through direct association that in Nortahmpton, UK, hundreds of Muslem and Hindu families try to get their kids into the RC school because of higher grades etc. This is because the schools concerned simply do not accept thick kids or ones from disadvantaged backgrounds.

i I know through direct association that in Nortahmpton, UK, hundreds of Muslem and Hindu families try to get their kids into the RC school because of higher grades etc. This is because the schools concerned simply do not accept thick kids or ones from disadvantaged backgrounds.

This may be a particular problem in Norhtants but elsewhwere RC school popultions seem to be a fairly average demographic. there is nothing to show that Papists are generally better off or brighter than the rest of the popultion. Nonetheless, their pupils suceeed better.

Merlijn de Smit asks “is the holocaust argument one that Swinburne has actually made or one that Dawkins thinks Swinburne has made?

I asked myself the same question and checked it out. What Dawkins says (page 64 of TGD) is that, on an occasion when he was on a television panel with Richard Swinburne and Peter Atkins, “Swinburne at one pointed attempted to justify the Holocaust on the grounds that it gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous and noble. Peter Atkins splendidly growled ‘May you rot in hell.’*”

However, Dawkins then mentions in the footnote to the asterisk: “This interchange was edited out of the final broadcast version.”

So Merlijn, your hunch seems to be justified. The Holocaust argument is one that Dawkins thinks Swinburne made – though perhaps Swinburne did indeed make it. But since it has been ‘edited out’ of the TV debate, we will never be able to determine the truth of the matter, even if Swinburne himself tells us his side of the story, which would not necessarily be objective (unless the TV channel in question actually keeps the cuts in its archives).

“we will never be able to determine the truth of the matter, even if Swinburne himself tells us his side of the story”

But thanks to Don (thank you, Don), we can determine at least that Swinburne has indeed made that argument in print, so it really doesn’t matter much whether or not he made it in that tv debate (plus of course his having made it in print makes his having made it in a tv debate highly plausible, and the likelihood that Dawkins is lying or misremembering very implausible indeed).

Really, if you think Swinburne doesn’t talk and write this horrifying kind of crap, just look into the matter a little, that’s all. He does. This is his considered view. This is his theodicy. This is his repulsive deity.

there is nothing to show that Papists are generally better off or brighter than the rest of the population. Nonetheless, their pupils succeed better.

To that I would add:

– Catholic schools are more disciplined and better organized than secular schools

– Therefore, their pupils perform better

– Therefore, more caring and motivated parents enroll their children there

– Therefore, their pupils perform even better …

A virtuous spiral, in other words.

If the price parents have to pay for assuring their children a decent education (in terms of learning the three Rs, the ten commandments, etc) is that their children will be also be indoctrinated by the running dogs of the Roman Harlot, few will be reluctant to pay it. For surely it is better to be an educated person than a semi-literate and innumerate product of a state-run sink school – which seems to be the only option in many parts of the Anglosphere.

I don’t see why this account strikes anyone as implausible. The idea that the suffering of others gives us the opportunity to be good and is therefore justifiable is an old theological staple – I would imagine that Swinburne just didn’t realise how it would sound to people outside that mind set. The last time I heard it was on Radio 4’s “Thought for the Day” when euthanasia was being discussed in the House of Lords. A “spiritual leader” described how euthanasia might have spared his father an agonizing death, but would have deprived the suffering man’s family of the opportunity to be compassionate towards him. It may seem bizarre, but some folk do actually think that way.

In other words, ‘faith’ schools are disguised or substitute grammar schools. And have precisely the same inegalitarian effects, presumably, so one wonders why the effects are okay via ‘faith’ schools but not okay via grammars. (To many people, of course, they’re not: lots of people keep urgently pointing out that ‘faith’ schools ‘perform better’ precisely because they are permitted to be selective while comprehensives are not. But why does the government think the effects are okay via the one and not the other? It’s a New Labour thing, I assume, and the nuances are obscure to an outsider.)

“Swinburne at one pointed attempted to justify the Holocaust on the grounds that it gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous and noble.”

Well reading the reference that OB provides, I think the word “justify” might be misleading here.

I wonder, though, if it is Swinburne’s view that the holocaust can be justified in the way, does this mean he is also committed to the view that counterfactually we would not have been justified to intervene before it had taken place to stop it?

(He might be tempted to reply that the heroism of intervention, etc., is part of the justification of the holocaust, but if he makes that argument, he’ll end up in a paradox.)

I’ve checked. Oh dear! It’s just that I’m a nice guy and like to think that ‘ordinary decent theologians’ can’t really believe such forking rubbish about the necessity of evil — but, yes, there is no gainsaying it, Swinburne does indeed ‘look on the bright side’ of genocide. Still, did Swinburne really say that the Holocaust gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous and noble? But I’ll stop defending this truly indefensible creep.

“A “spiritual leader” described how euthanasia might have spared his father an agonizing death, but would have deprived the suffering man’s family of the opportunity to be compassionate towards him.”

Yup. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, it was. We talked about it here at the time. I nearly said as much. I wondered if he got it from Swinburne.

“I think the word “justify” might be misleading here”

Fair point. But he would have been (I surmise, because this is how it comes up) justifying god for letting it happen. It’s sheer Milton – “justify the ways of God to man.” So justifying the Holocaust itself, no, but justifying a good god for allowing it, yes. (Does that deal with the paradox of intervention? I don’t know if it does, myself, which I think is part of what I said in previous comments on Swinburne – does that mean sick people shouldn’t be treated etc?)

I bet I know how he would resolve the paradox, come to think of it. Keith Ward says something along those lines in the discussion with Grayling in Prospect. He’d say there is no paradox, because it’s to do with god’s knowledge. God knows who needs to suffer and who needs to be rescued – so he knows when to let the Holocaust proceed and when to let the Allies intervene.

But that’s actually quite a different thing. There’s an obvious rule utilitarian type argument to do with free will which will make it come out that God is justified in not intervening (especially when it is combined with thoughts about good coming from bad).

And if that is what Swinburne has written – and said in that tv interview – then possibly Dawkins’s remarks are libellous. You’ve got to get this stuff right.

Not that I’ve read either Dawkins or Swinburne! So when I say that people have got to get things right, I mean everyone except me, obviously.

OB: But why does the government think the effects are okay via the one and not the other?

Presumably because in terms of vote-catching, ‘grammar school’ is a dirtier word than ‘faith school’. The secret is that faith schools manage to be selective without laying their selectiveness on with a trowel, i.e. via the 11-plus. They are a nicer and more refined way of separating the talented from the ‘unacademic’ child. I suppose they could be called a ‘politically correct’ version of the grammar school. (BTW I swear never again to use the ‘PC’-word’ again on this site.)

And of course faith schools are part of an ‘inegalitarian’ system. Alas, the opposite to an ‘inegalitarian’ education system is not an ‘egalitarian’ one, but an infantilised and dumbed-down one where all must have prizes – in the real existing Anglophone world, at least.

Yeah but Swinburne’s argument here isn’t the free will one – it’s that some people (and god knows which) need the opportunity to receive sympathy, or to show courage, and other people need to demonstrate their sympathy and so on.

Sacks in fact made a kind of anti-free will, or at least anti freedom of choice, argument: he explicitly said he was glad his father had not had the opportunity to check out early, so that he (J Sacks) and I think his brothers could have the opportunity to care for him. For some reason his opportunity to care trumped his father’s possible desire not to suffer any more.

“So when I say that people have got to get things right”

But you didn’t say that people have got to get things right, you said “You’ve got to get this stuff right” – I took “you” to mean me (since you were answering me) and that you were saying I was libelling Swinburne. A relief that you said people in the next line.

“Swinburne at one pointed attempted to justify the Holocaust on the grounds that it gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous and noble. Peter Atkins splendidly growled ‘May you rot in hell.’*”

Dawkins misrepresents his argument a little. Oversimplifies it. Which is what a good many reviewers complain of in the book generally. Yeah – if Swinburne made the same argument on the tv debate that he’s made elsewhere, that misrepresents it.

I suspect that your views on the current educational system in the UK are not formed by first hand experience. There are bad schools, but the fact that they tend to be in places with serious socio-economic problems is not a coincidence.

‘without laying their selectiveness on with a trowel’

Tell that to the good people of Middlesbrough, stuck with a Vardy Foundation school which celebrated it’s triumph by excluding ten times the national average of pupils. Who then were placed in under-funded state schools.

Discipline? Meaning ‘if we think you are going to be a problem we will get rid of you and let someone else deal’

OK, when we talk of faith schools each of us probably has a model in mind. It might be the village CofE primary which put on a great harvest festival and sometimes had a nice vicar pottering around admiring the displays. It might be a chorister school with centuries of tradition and an elite, dedicated, inclusive and humanist staff. My particular bugbear is the Vardy Foundation (Google and weep).

So no, not every ‘faith’ school is a hot-bed of indoctrination and bigotry and bloody-minded ignorance. Some – many – are just old well-established schools which have built up a tradition of good will and a generally positive ethos and which don’t lay it on with a trowel.

Well I don’t know what Swinburne’s argument is – since I haven’t read him. But if he isn’t making these arguments about good coming from bad within the context of a free-will, rule utilitarian thing, he’s missing a trick.

Also, the reference you provide does say:

“Thus, for Swinburne, despite its own intrinsic evil, the Holocaust is understood as a practical consequence of the existence of human freedom.”

And this is apologetics. Again I haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, but I think it would be surprising if he thought his argument about good from bad stood on its own. It’ll be part of a series of argument. I’d guess. Could be wrong, though.

*One* should get these things right. I don’t even know what a pronoun is!

The difference between grammar schools and ‘faith’ schools, to continue the digression, is that the child has to pass an actual exam to get into a grammar, whereas to get into a ‘faith’ school, so the common wisdom goes, it is merely necessary to kiss up to the local vicar [or other anointed faith representative]. Thus it is a gift to pushy, middle-class parents secretly pretty certain that their little brats haven’t the gumption for a truly competitive process, but determined to get them every leg-up they can.

The way this country has f*cked over the comprehensive ideal, while kidding itself it isn’t, in about 20 different ways, will one day make a marvellous volume in the annals of hypocrisy.

Yeh, he does make the argument within the context of free will. But he goes on from that to argue that the suffering is actually a good thing – not the nasty outcome of free will, but an intrinsic good. I think the more standard tack is to admit that suffering is nasty; necessary for free will, but nasty. Swinburne, bravely or foolishly, takes the more distasteful path. The Job’s comforters path. It didn’t work for them, so I don’t see why he bothers.

A pronoun is the thing where the subject of the object has to verb with the adjective and all of them have to agree with the first one.

“Thus it is a gift to pushy, middle-class parents secretly pretty certain that their little brats haven’t the gumption for a truly competitive process, but determined to get them every leg-up they can.”

Reminds me of Cleese’s comprehensive headmaster in ‘Clockwise’ telling an audience of parents much the same thing. “…if only we’d got the money.”

If you take a secular look at this problem of evil, perhaps as adversity, then maybe there are equivalents to the enlightenment which someone like Swinburne derives; a calling, a challenge, character-building or merely nice-when-it-stops, in some curious senses life without it entirely might not be any the richer, just the dullness of hydroponics. That is not to lessen continuing attempts to mitigate suffering, but more generally to say that the good life isn’t necessarily the easy one. You’re the philosopher, so as with Russell and the cabbie, you tell me!

I’ve checked. Oh dear! It’s just that I’m a nice guy and like to think that ‘ordinary decent theologians’ can’t really believe such forking rubbish about the necessity of evil — but, yes, there is no gainsaying it, Swinburne does indeed ‘look on the bright side’ of genocide. Still, did Swinburne really say that the Holocaust gave the Jews a wonderful opportunity to be courageous and noble? But I’ll stop defending this truly indefensible creep.

My thoughts exactly. Even if Dawkins did misrepresent his viewpoints, this hardly excuses them. And it’s such an unnecessary move to make. Once you are accepting libertarian free will, it becomes unnecessary to present human-willed evil as somehow excused by a greater God, as OB pointed out. So it suprises me that Swinburne does make these arguments within the context of free will.

And presumbly, though I haven’t given this any thought, it is a necessary move because in the end it will be necessary for Swinburne to explain why free will itself is preferable to something else. Therefore, where free will goes badly, it has to be contextualised against its advantages.

If I were to make this argument, it would go something like this:

a) Free will is good because it leads to x good stuff (which no doubt will include intrinsic stuff);

“You don’t expect me to have the faintest clue what any of that means, do you!?”

Of course not, it’s complete gibberish!

“Does he actually say it is an intrinsic good (again, I haven’t read him)?

Is it not that it is integrally related to intrinsic goods?”

I’m not sure, I’ll have to have a look at whatever it was I commented on. But the way I remember it, he did seem to be treating suffering as an intrinsic good. He was focused on the by-products of suffering rather than the by-products of free will. Keith Ward takes a similar line in recent discussion with Grayling. God makes world of this kind (where earthquakes, for instance, are necessary for stability), horrible things happen, but – we hope God brings us to final fulfillment through him. Pathetic stuff, really. But Swinburne’s chief point was, if I remember, the real and significant good that comes out of suffering and horrible things.

(Again guessing) Yes, but presumably he has to make this move because suffering itself is sometimes a by-product of free will. So he wants to point out that the by-products of suffering can be good so that the moral calculus vis-a-vis free will isn’t so massively negative in these horrible instances that they falsify his argument that free will plus non-interference is better overall than some other thing.

Also, I think by-products aren’t intrinsic. It is possible to think suffering in and of itself is a good thing. Runners have a bit of this attitude, for example.

here’s the article I was commenting on in linked comment last June. It’s about intercessory prayer and the fact that it doesn’t always work.

“Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes — for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives — allows us to suffer pain and disability.

Although intrinsically bad states, these difficult times often serve good purposes for the sufferers and for others. My suffering provides me with the opportunity to show courage and patience. It provides you with the opportunity to show sympathy and to help alleviate my suffering. And it provides society with the opportunity to choose whether or not to invest a lot of money in trying to find a cure for this or that particular kind of suffering.”

He does mention responsibility and free choice after that – but he seems to me to be saying that the suffering is good for our (freely choosing, responsible etc) character. The character is more in the foreground than the free choice (he doesn’t say free will) is.

“A good God gives us a deep responsibility for ourselves, each other and the world, for whether and how we flourish, and for the free choice of how to exercise that responsibility. And it is good for us to have this responsibility. Although a good God regrets our suffering, his greatest concern is surely that each of us shall show patience, sympathy and generosity and, thereby, form a holy character. Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.”

The thing about that article is that to a non-theist it’s just so obvious that Swinburne is looking at the world as it is and then crafting strained explanations to make it all fit with benevolent theism. His edifice creaks every time he breathes – but he’s happy with it.

“But does positing free will or freedom as a good necessarily include positing all the consequences of free will as, on balance, good?”

No, but that isn’t what I argued. It is that intrinsic good of free will, plus consequences of free will come out on balance ahead of some alternative (where the one which I posited was free will plus interference).

And, of course, none of this is obviously the case, because it’s bollocks (probably). But the question is whether it is an arguable position. My view is that it is an arguable position (even if one isn’t inclined to accept it).

Yeah. I think that’s an arguable position – but that ad hoccy stuff of Swinburne’s not so much. I mean honestly – people being ill provides society with an opportunity to decide how to spend money. Please.

Ken says, ‘It may seem bizarre, but some folk do actually think that way.’

Yeh, but some people actually think it’s OK to be an axe murderer or to be Hitler. It doesn’t make it right or desirable by most human beings.

And, if suffering allows people to develop noble characteristics, why invent the need for those noble characteristics if someone else’s suffering is the price? Why do we need to be noble if nobility is not necessary?

“people being ill provides society with an opportunity to decide how to spend money”

Isn’t this the broken windows fallacy? Or at least the problem of market externalities.

John Humphries debated Rowan Williams on Radio 4 the other morning, and used the example of a child with cancer as the kind of intolerable suffering God causes. Williams argued that the child would have an eternity after death for God to make things right. If that doesn’t raise more questions than it answers I don’t know what does.

If you believe in god, you believe he invented suffering and nobility, when neither needed to exist. It’s hard to realise that without getting into the unpleasant implications of us all being pawns in a game dreamt up by a deity who must have been bored out of his mind. It presumably pleases him to see his creations going through machinations he could predict down to the sub-atomic level. If it doesn’t please him, I guess he’s a masochist to boot, because he calls all the shots, doesn’t he? He didn’t have to give us free will, after all.

The thought of people like Swinburne being that kind of pawn and lecturing all the rest of the pawns about it is pretty vomit-making, isn’t it?

‘It seems to me that it is not hugely counterintuitive that there is some levels of x and y that would make the second of these alternatives more attractive than the first.’

I agree. In fact the world of no suffering is available to all of us on a personal level (theoretically at least). We could choose to be lobotomised and then be perfectly happy, but we prefer to have the benefits of full consciousness at the cost of a bit of anguish.

The problem is, why does god make the extremes of suffering so particularly awful? There really is no need for childhood leukaemia or motor neuron disease. Those things seem to be almost creatively repulsive.

Mind you, having said that, my father has been transformed since he was diagnosed with parkinson’s disease from (let’s be frank) a bit of a cunt, unloved and unloveable, to a genuinely thoughtful, interesting, interested, considerate and loving person who really does seem to inspire the people around him. It’s a bit glling sometimes to have people who have only come to know him in his illness ell me what a marvellous man he is but then it’s a funny old world, as the acient philosopher remarked..

Yes, sure, ok, but not only, in the world created by Swinburne’s god, has god determined the precise levels of both, he has also determined whether and how we should be able to sense their existence and find them relevant to our existence. One can imagine two alternatives, but why only two and why only those? Getting philosophically sophisticated sometimes seems too much to lavish on something that is so clearly the product of the child-parent relationship recast on a cosmic scale.

“in the world created by Swinburne’s god, has god determined the precise levels of both”

Yes, but to the extent that Swinburne makes this argument, it’s the wrong move (in my opinion).

The argument should be that God has created us with free will, free will amounts to nothing if it is subject to God’s interference, free will is an intrinsic good, it is also associated with extrinsic goods, it sometimes leads to unimaginable horror, but even in these situations one can see good stuff (a lot of it having precisely to do with our automony), though this is not to justify the horrible stuff.

But obviously, as John M points out it is hard to think that our world could not have been a little kinder, and yet have allowed us to keep all the good stuff that comes with free will and suffering.

But I still think you guys are making a mistake if you think Swinburne is an idiot. Sure we all think he’s wrong, but if these arguments were easy to dismiss then he wouldn’t be making them.

“The argument should be that God has created us with free will, free will amounts to nothing if it is subject to God’s interference…”

Aren’t we then back to the question of the limits of god’s powers? Even if he marks off an area of his creation for non-interference, aren’t all the starting conditions entirely of his making, meaning that all, obedience and deviation included, is known to him in advance? The foreknowledge (from our perspective) may not be the same as an absence of free will, but doesn’t it (philosophically) ultimately render it just as meaningless?

I am glad at last this discussion may now move away from kicking the dog-collar, into what is a real challenge to secular humanism. If religion wasn’t ordained but evolved as a narrative to explain human experience, the removal of that particular explanation doesn’t actually change that experience, which is still quite brutish enough. Chritianity didn’t invent cancer and I don’t think Swinburne is really trying to say that suffering is inherently good (though perhaps Jerry is right to say he’s not being very clever about saying it).

Do we actually aspire to a life of risk-free hydroponic security? Thousands of remote innocents are slaughtered on the brand new altar of ‘security’, liberties are forfeited to that same deity, who is of course as nebulous as his predecessors. These are huge challenges to the new narrative (call it secular humanism) which if this thread is anything to go by is preoccupied with academic point scoring and god-bashing.

Blair now wants everyone’s dna because ‘we have nothing to hide’, a position nicely demolished by Baggini in these very pages, but one that will prevail if clever people like those who post here do nothing.

“The secret is that faith schools manage to be selective without laying their selectiveness on with a trowel, i.e. via the 11-plus. They are a nicer and more refined way of separating the talented from the ‘unacademic’ child.”

Quite. You made my point for me eloquently. I’m paying for this religious selection for the economic advantaged merely on the basis of being a UK taxpayer. If you were in the UK, imagine, in Northern Ireland and paying taxes in the 1960s, as a Roman Catholic, with kids to educate, and this situation was reversed, I presume your assumption of naturally nice and brighter local electorate would obtain also ?

Well that’s the argument that I’d make against a Swinburne-type position, but not I think as a way to undermine the free will argument. I think the apparent paradox between foreknowledge and free will was solved a long time ago actually.

But, as perhaps you are suggesting, there are other complications to do with creation, foreknowledge, etc (as, for example, exemplified in the debates between people such as Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd).

I know people here find it hard to believe, but theological argument can be complex, impressive and hard to refute.

That’s not to say that its premises aren’t barmy – they are – but again, these people aren’t idiots.

So, JS, what you suggest is that, being outside of time, God would behold the beginning and the end of the universe, including all our free actions, ‘at once’, without there being a contradiction between free will and Divine foreknowledge as there is no ‘foreknowledge’ or ‘after-the-fact knowledge’ on the part of a non-temporal Deity, right?

(I suppose such a version of Theism could be quite consistent at least in that respect. But I don’t really like the idea of a wholly atemporal Deity for other reasons)

yes, I don’t suppose there is can be collective noun for atheists. What Swinburne did or didn’t say seems rather beside the point when the problem of evil still has to be confronted post-Swinburne and it’s now ‘The Security Delusion’ etc that I would rather see these clever guys disecting. The level of argument out there (Blair’s dna is but one) is shocking. The problem Swinburne contorts under is the same thing we find wrapped up in, and equally deceitfully assuaged in political manifestos, where we can have freedoms secured over others’dead bodies, where environmental costs can be deferred with similar complacency, where surplus and starvation coexist.

Swinburne is trying to explain adversity (ridiculously), but at least he acknowledges it. We, the comfortable, delude ourselves as to its existence. These are the fashionable nonsenses in need of confrontation.

Actually it’s unfair to expect these philosophers not to just want a good natter before retiring to the pub, but if only their skills had found their way to the top table as was suggested 350BC, then the BC bit might now be irrelevant. Better stop before Mombiotfication sets in.

“I know people here find it hard to believe, but theological argument can be complex, impressive and hard to refute.”

I would be grateful if the next person to make this claim could provide examples. Or hyperlinks. Or an ISBN. And if they could explain how the theologian’s God is related to the God that ordinary people talk to.

An atemporally omniscient God cannot be a loving God or an interventionist God and is, ironically, not omnipotent. Once again the theological God is not the God that people “actually experience”, and as an answer is more problematic than the question it fails to answer.

Well an example is precisely this argument about the problem of evil. If you’re able to show where my Christian apologetics is going wrong, then you’ll be the first person here.

Other people have gestured at various things, but so far… well nodoby is going to win a prize in the destructive argument of the day contest.

And if you want examples of sophisticated theological thinking (dealing with some of these problems, including the issue of how it is possible for humans to have a relationship with a wholly transcendent God), then why not read (or read about):

Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd and Ibn al-Arabi.

However, if your point is simply that there is a bunch of people in Texas who believe a lot of nonsense about God – well, you know, it’s hardly a news story, and frankly the idea of taking on their beliefs is just too easy for my taste. (With the caveat that I do agree that it is necessary to resist them politically, etc, and I think that one should do whatever is necessary to achieve that end, including bashing their beliefs, if that turns out to be necessary).

I hear it stated quite often here that the theological God is not the God people actually believe in – but is there really a strict, unbridgeable dichotomy between them? Are you really sure about that? If we are dealing with the Christian literary tradition, we are dealing with theologically quite elaborate conceptions of God. Christianity was strongly Hellenistic. And Christianity as a faith has been shaped by this philosophically informed literary tradition. The Bible has both the very concrete tribal God of the Old Testament and the abstract, Platonic logos of John. Perhaps the God people actually believe in may be more sophisticated than he is made out to be? At least I think the dichotomy between theology and faith as argued for by OB, may not be so absolute as suggested.

Nick S. objects to the secular taxpayer’s being obliged to fund ‘faith’ schools. I agree.

But religious taxpayers could retort that they are obliged to fund ‘godless’ state schools – and demand tit for tat.

No doubt the only peaceful solution in a multicultural society is to live and let live — and to privatize the entire education system, while providing vouchers for the poor. Secular humanists could set up their own fee-paying schools and compete with the Papists, Prods and Infidels in the ‘knowledge and indoctrination’ market.

Jerry S: “But I still think you guys are making a mistake if you think Swinburne is an idiot. Sure we all think he’s wrong, but if these arguments were easy to dismiss then he wouldn’t be making them.”

“An interesting conjunction of remarks. Until I see Swinburne make good arguments, I’ll act on the available evidence and assume that he doesn’t have any.”

Just so. Or at least – in my case, I won’t necessarily assume that he doesn’t have any, but I certainly won’t assume that he does, or that we ought not to criticize the arguments of his that we’ve actually read on the grounds that Jerry S assumes he’s better at it elsewhere.

Yes, they exclude anyone potentially disruptive, who might be difficult to educate, and whose education might make a real difference to their life-chances, in favour of people already tuned-in to a dominant ethos, who they can pass through status-affirming examinations smoothly and with the minimum of effort.

“Yes, they exclude anyone potentially disruptive, who might be difficult to educate, and whose education might make a real difference to their life-chances …”

No, Dave, you got it wrong. Do your homework first.

They exclude kids who are actually disruptive, who are clearly impossible to educate, and whose attempted education might make a real difference to the life-chances of all the other kids in the class by making it impossible for them to learn anything other than fork-this, fork-that and go fork-yourself…

Recommended reading for Dave:

‘Our Culture, What’s Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses’, by Theodore Dalrymple.

Another book on the collapse of the once-great, though underfunded education system in the UK is: “Everyone Shall have Prizes” – I can’r remember the author.

Between the two main governing parties in this country, the education system was sytematicallyu, and deliberately destroyed, for dogmatic “reasons” between 1968 and 2005-6.

Now, they are JUST starting to wake up to the damage done.

But it will take at least 15-18 years to put right, assuming that they know what to do in the first place.

Pointers:

1. You can’t beat natural selection: – intelligent parents tend to have intelligent children, and intelligent people tend to be better-paid.

2. You do, quite frequently, though, get intelligent children from stupid, or very-poorly paid parents. Therfore, every effort should be made to ensure that these children get a really good education, and that they should NOT have to pay.

3. Having more than 25% of the population REALLY going to a “proper” university is impossible, so forget it.

4. So you MUST, also have a second-level of continuing higher education at the next level down – they used to be called “technical colleges” which do part-time degrees, HNC’s etc, etc.

Valuable and very useful.

As it stands, though, someone like my late father, whose own father died when he was 12, leaving my grandmother with two sons to bring up could not possibly go to a proper university, get a Physics degree, and M.Sc. in Chemistry, and retire in 1976 as an F.R.I.C.

The appalling state schools, where academic excellence is frowned on, and the ghastly student loans would prevent that.

AFAIR, MP did not raise the issue of natural selection and the hereditary dimension of intelligence at all. Her basic assumption was/is that virtually all poor academic performance is due to bad schooling, rather than to inherited cognitive disadvantages — a kind of conservative version of ‘nurture beats nature’. But I confess that five years have elapsed since I read her book.

“Well an example is precisely this argument about the problem of evil. If you’re able to show where my Christian apologetics is going wrong, then you’ll be the first person here.”

I wrote:

“”An atemporally omniscient God cannot be a loving God or an interventionist God and is, ironically, not omnipotent.””

Subtitute coterminous for atemporal to taste. If we accept your apologetics, God is in trouble.

Keith had a good argument about the fallacy of the excluded middle in your apologetics as well.

“why not read (or read about):

Ibn Sina, Al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd and Ibn al-Arabi.”

Thank you.

“However, if your point is simply that there is a bunch of people in Texas who believe a lot of nonsense about God – well, you know, it’s hardly a news story, and frankly the idea of taking on their beliefs is just too easy for my taste.”

OK, but string theorists don’t tell electricians that they cannot actually wire up light sockets. And however ignorant of Darwinism they are, the faithful have not seen a man evolve into a monkey before their eyes. But they do have a relationship with God.

“An atemporally omniscient God cannot be a loving God or an interventionist God and is, ironically, not omnipotent.”

Sure, I get it. But my point is that theologians have been producing sophisticated answers to this kind of thing for two millennia. Check out Philo of Alexandria, for example, and his reworking of the notion of Logos.

Off the top of my head – and being absolutely nothing like an expert on these matters – I can think of about four responses to the problem of atemporality vs. earthly intervention, etc.

Also, I ought to say that my claim here isn’t that it is possible for theologians to get consistent about these things (indeed, I suspect that it is not). Simply that people are wrong if they think it is going to be easy to provide the knock out punch to show where there is inconsistency (if they’re dealing with the ideas that are the trade of professional theologians).

Keith hasn’t said anything that is remotely troubling.

I am after all an atheist. And actually I think the problem of evil is fairly devastating for the Christian conception of God. But I’m not convinced it is the kind of argument that means that one is required to give up such a belief on the pain of logical contradiction.

Anyway, I’ve said all I’ve got to say about this stuff. All I wanted to point out was that Dawkins – as he was quoted here – was misrepresenting Swinburne. And that is true. He was. But then I got carried away… A moment of weakness!

“Simply that people are wrong if they think it is going to be easy to provide the knock out punch to show where there is inconsistency (if they’re dealing with the ideas that are the trade of professional theologians).”

Meaning what? That ‘people,’ meaning us, are wrong to say that Swinburne says foolish things in that article because he is a professional theologian and therefore knows how to deal with the ideas he deals with? Even though you admitted that the article is terrible?

What is this, a defense of credentialism? A warning-off of ignorant outsiders?

“But then I got carried away”

By…? The need to tell us we’re not qualified or entitled to say that Swinburne wrote a silly article on account of how he’s a professional theologian?

i Studen loans prevent peole from going to University, because you wind up with a £35 000 debt, that’s why, before you’ve even earnt a single penny.

Only if your income reaches a certain level and you do not come from an espacially deprived bckground. If you can reach the minimum level without higher education and your only interest in higher education is utlititarian, you should be dicouraged from going to university, it is the wrong place for you. That is a benefit of the loan system.

Cathal, and I thought *my* view was cynical. I bet you think all the ‘forkers’ should be tagged at birth, eh? Keep ’em out of areas where the Nice People play? Or better yet, just chop their goolies off, that way there won’t be any more of the litte ‘forkers’….

Theodore Dalrymple is a salutary observer of the underclass, and a fine writer, but the construction of an underclass, as he often reflects, is a multifaceted process. Deciding in childhood that some people are literally ineducable is a good way to guarantee its perpetuation.

Moreover, selective schooling *is not* about excluding the ‘worst’ — hey, they don’t even bother trying. It’s about reinforcing privilege. It shouldn’t be, but it is. Even the beloved 11-plus was always manipulated, so that magically the right number of people achieved the ‘objective’ standard every year to fill the available places, and be allowed ‘up’ to a level of education richer people got by just paying for it…

The kind of selection we have now, here in the UK at least, is mostly about how pushy you are, and how far you are prepared to go in lying about your ‘faith’ to avoid being near ‘difficult’ children. I can’t blame the parents for wanting the best for their kids, but I can blame the system for promoting conscious mendacity in the name of ‘faith education’ — now *that’s* cynical.

Except that it does not seem to have that effect. The Grammar school system was responsible for an enormous amount of social mobiltity, most notably into those bastions of privilage Oxford and cambridge.

The kind of selection we have now, here in the UK at least, is mostly about how pushy you are, and how far you are prepared to go in lying about your ‘faith’ to avoid being near ‘difficult’ children.

Dave, in a way this proves my point. It seems that parents will do almost anything to further the best interests of their own offspring – and when the choice is between reasonably well-organised religious schools and badly organised, ‘anything-goes’ state schools, they will opt for the former. HNBWII, even secular humanists will suddenly ‘discover’ Intelligent Design, if need be, or swallow down transsubstantiation and the Holy Trinity – if that’s the price they have to pay for ensuring that their children learn the three Rs and maximise their adaptive fitness. [HNBWII = human nature being what it is].

The only workable alternatives would appear to be a genuinely educability-based rather than wealth-based selective system of state education or a totally privatised education system, where parents make their own independent decisions (depending no doubt on their degree of ‘pushiness’). Both options, of course, have their downsides – I suppose ultimately it’s all a matter of trade-offs between bad and worse.

********

By the way, is there any such thing as a private and successful ‘secular humanist’ school in the UK?

My hunch is that there are not enough secular humanist parents in any of the country’s catchment areas to fill a classroom, let alone an entire school.

It seems that parents will do almost anything to further the best interests of their own offspring – and when the choice is between reasonably well-organised religious schools and badly organised, ‘anything-goes’ state schools, they will opt for the former.

Sorry, can’t let this lie. Exactly my original point. So why the kid gloves, touchy-feely crap talked about everywhere ‘respecting others beliefs’ while we’re financing more of these blasted schools ? Why not just be honest ? Iit’s just a way of getting more private finance into education and satisfying the whims of loudmouth religious biggots, seemingly intent as they are on imposing a faith based aopardheidt on an already f@cked generation.

Cathal, by the way, not all non-religious schools as you imply merely churn out economically challeneged antisocial and stupid b@astards. As you’re an expat, you’ll just have to trust me.

Dalrymple may hate, with all his being, the poor people who came to his Birmingham surgery when he practiced medicne, but an education policy expert this does not him make.

This thread goes on forever but I can’t resist referring back to G. Tingley’s claim that “[y]ou can’t beat natural selection: – intelligent parents tend to have intelligent children, and intelligent people tend to be better-paid.”

G. Tingley really will have to learn how to tiptoe through the tulips. That is not how one states the obvious in our squeamish age. The obvious must always be stated obliquely.

GT, write it down 50 times:

“Many experts argue that you can’t beat natural selection: – debate rages as to whether intelligent parents tend to have intelligent children, and some differential psychologists reckon that intelligent people tend to be better-paid.”

Some readers think that OB and JS do it very neatly on page 116 (first paragraph) of ‘Why Truth Matters’ when addressing the hot-button topic of the distribution of male v. female intelligence.

Sorry, but I trained as a physicist, and I have an M.Sc. in Engineering, and I used to try to teach science to 11-18 year olds.

You DO NOT EVER “Tiptoe through the tulips”.

The brutal truth as hard and as convincing as you can make it, is the only way to go. That way, at least SOME of the message will sink in.

So, some politically-sensitive little flowers don’t like an inconvenient and brutal truth.

Tough, grow up.

It’s almost as bad as beleiving in a kind overseeing god, even after the tsunami, and, for that matter the survivors of the camps (both the Konzentrazionslaager & the Gulag) whom I worked with many years ago.

Maybe I’ve missed the point of B&W, but there is little here to dispell a view ‘out there’ that professional philosophy is so far up its own backside that daylight is totally excluded and the smell of coffee but a distant memory. It may be fun to split academic hairs over Prof. Swinburne’s rather clumsy attempts to do something religion has always done, namely the claim to lead the faithful through adversities which otherwise are disconcertingly meaningless. A security blanket, my comfort still, etc.

While this ‘debate’ is going on there is a parallel theism at work ‘out there’, arguably becoming more deluding than many of its antecedants (whose benefits are largely ignored in this god-bashing). Adversity is still there and a paliative still sought, but this time if we ignore some of the superficial religious cloaking, it is a hijacked secular voice we hear. The voice that offers security at the expense of others that would shame any christian moralist. A great leap backwards!

And while this fiddling goes on, the burning smell isn’t coffee, but the smouldering of a once great hope for enlightened values, whose three-legged stool goes in for urgent repairs next tuesday (or onto the bonfire). Voters will be offered more of same nebulous security but at a price they can afford because someone else will pay, whether in Iraq, the third world, the oceans, or wherever. The stool is in danger of becoming a shooting stick.

If ‘Truth Matters’ then it matters ‘out there’, in the apology for a debate on this age old nut, the security contract. What Swinburne promises is what the Neocons superficially promise (with a lot more besides). Isn’t this preoccupation with the former just staring into the wall?

“It may be fun to split academic hairs over Prof. Swinburne’s rather clumsy attempts”

But that’s just what I’m not trying to do – hence, I assume, the rather condescending and sneering rebukes based on Swinburne’s credentials. I’m not trying to split academic hairs (which is as well, because I’m not an academic, to put it mildly), I’m trying to say what’s obviously wrong with what he says.

sorry, maybe too many ellipses. I just think it a shame if such energies are spent on one relatively harmless theology (Swinburne’s)when there is a parallel and imo rather nastier one out there which needs challenging. It is the very same sort of evil myth and protection racket offered by both, but this neocon version is far more destructive.

There was a nice piece by Nussbaum saying that Rawls had blamed philosophy for the bad thinking that allowed some of the c20 ills. I think there is a lot of scope for better thinking again now, so your ‘trade’ is of particular importance and there is rather more weighty fashionable nonsense to be tackled ‘out there’. People are otherwise too easily duped.

I did not ‘tell a whopper’ — I interpreted what you wrote in a particular way, namely as endeavouring to touch a hot button without causing offence.

It is possible that I misinterpreted you, but of course it is also possible that you are misinterpreting yourself — nobody is immune to self-deception.

A ‘whopper’ is generally defined as ‘a blatant and outrageous lie’. Now if anything is ‘absolute brazen bullshit’, it is to accuse somebody of telling such a lie without pretty sound evidence.

However, being an amicable guy I will take it that by ‘whopper’ you simply mean ‘inability to understand plain and simple English’, which would merely cast aspersions on my analytical skills rather than on my moral integrity.

I shall now return to reading ‘The Lives of the Saints’ (248th edition). St Theresa of Lisieux would certainly not have used the word ‘whopper’.

Such energies. Well, some readers would (and do) agree with you, or would at least agree that I should shut up about it. What can I say. It interests me; I don’t think it is harmless; I do challenge the other one as well (and anyway I think they’re intimately related, which is part of the point); there is a lot of the Swinburne kind of thing around; etc.

I’m kind of tired of the shut up about it line at the moment, to tell the truth. (I don’t mean that’s what you’re saying.) I could just as well retort the same thing – I’m harmless; I’m not damaging Swinburne; I’m not helping the neocons; I think these ideas are somewhat interesting and somewhat influential and somewhat harmful and somewhat worth looking at. I’m kind of tired of being told it’s not legitimate or that amateurs need not apply. I’m an amateur; but ideas like Swinburne’s are out there and affect us all (via euthanasia debates for one); I feel like spending some energy thinking about them.

Well, Cathal, you’ve said yourself that you like to say provocative things for effect. I took your interpretation to be an example of that – because your reading does seem to me to be willfully wrongheaded and tendentious. And surely you realize that it amounts to saying that paragraph itself is lying, and that that might be irritating? Surely that comment was meant to be annoying and provocative? Well congratulations: it annoyed me. That’s not hard to do today; I said that.

I’m unenthusiastic about Swinburne on the basis of the scraps and bits I’ve read about him elsewhere as well. The attempt to give some kind of definite probability to the Resurrection or the existence of God sits ill with me: it seems that with a (alleged) historic event such as the Resurrection, the weight of circumstancial evidence cannot be quantified in such a simple way. Theologically, it seems to me that specifying a probability to the existence of God implies God is a contingent being, which would seem to me to be very much a minority position in theology. And here too, the “evidence” is much too equivocal and open to interpretation to state that it is “64%” (was it 64%? Something like that) certain that God exists.

Of course, my grasp on Bayesian statistics is pretty much zero. It could be that Swinburne’s argument is water-tight. But it definitely doesn’t look like that to me.

What offends me about the article about theodicy is not so much the attempt to reconcile the existence of evil with the existence of a good God, but the haughtiness and arrogance with which it is done. The cool, unperturbed certainty which wafts from such sentences as: Theodicy provides good explanations of why God sometimes — for some or all of the short period of our earthly lives — allows us to suffer pain and disability. and Some people badly need to be ill for their own sake, and some people badly need to be ill to provide important choices for others. Only in that way can some people be encouraged to make serious choices about the sort of person they are to be. For other people, illness is not so valuable.

I’m sure that is all very comforting to hear to a kid with the misfortune to be born in a cholera-infested hell-hole in subsaharan Africa. Her misfortune is valuable, because it inspires well-off Westerners to give a dime or two to Oxfam or something.

Seems to me, Swinburne’s God is the God of the healthy, the well-to-do, the comfortable, who presents them with spectacles of suffering and misery (never theirs) in order to inspire them to feel good and holy about themselves.

OB: Sorry to hear you’re in a bad mood, but don’t stop writing about theological issues. Pace Dawkins, I do not believe Swinburne is typical of the theological mind, or of theodicy in general. But you’re right about this one. I almost find myself agreeing with G. Tingey over Swinburne.

OB: “I’m an amateur; but ideas like Swinburne’s are out there and affect us all (via euthanasia debates for one); I feel like spending some energy thinking about them.”

Yes!

Most of the arguments I’ve read on such issues (euthenasia, abortion) are not particularly sophisticated. And many (at least some) are easily rebutted. That doesn’t stop the same arguments being made again, and again, and…

Surely that comment was meant to be annoying and provocative? Well congratulations: it annoyed me. That’s not hard to do today; I said that.

Oh dear, and I actually recommended that readers buy your book, which incidentally I’ve read twice, and which I found was in many ways almost as good as my gold standard, namely Steven Goldberg’s ‘When Wish Replaces Thought’.

Thanks, Merlijn and Keith. I feel better. Okay, I won’t stop! (Weedy of me to let all this he’s a professional theologian and you’re an ignorant peasant crap get me down, but it does.)

Well exactly, about Swinburne’s tone. That’s why I keep calling his claim cruel. I keep thinking of all the people tormenting themselves wondering why god thinks they badly need to be ill. Am I too cowardly? Have I been too happy? Etc. It’s just horrible, horrible stuff. People who talk about the consolation of religion overlook that kind of thing, it seems to me, but people do make themselves miserable with worries like that. Julia Sweeney remarked that actually it’s consoling to think that a disease is just something that happens and that’s all there is to it.

Sorry, Cathal. It’s just that that para really isn’t evasive – it’s trying to describe the issues with precision. So I got bad-tempered. Thanks for the compliment and the plug!

those are generous thoughts, but I wish you wouldn’t keep calling yourself amateur (at least not as a derrogatory) – it pushes many of the rest of us off the scale entirely. I shouldn’t have suggested you should stop because really I don’t think that; I am perhaps frustrated that the other protection racket so often lacks the quality of well reasoned assault Religion is currently enjoying (they would claim to enjoy it wouldn’t they?)

Oh, sorry – that wasn’t what I meant! (To push anyone off the scale.) On the contrary. I was reacting to JS’s comment about ‘ideas that are the trade of professional theologians’. I wanted to clarify, in reaction to that, that I’m aware that I’m not a professional theologian.

I agree with you about the other protection racket, of course. Well – inch by inch…

I keep thinking of all the people tormenting themselves wondering why god thinks they badly need to be ill.

They who suffer are fools – worse, they think only of themselves. They should think of the redemption they grant others through compassion. Better still, they should be getting out there and torturing and oppressing people in order to give an even wider audience the chance to feel compassion and find ease from pain in Faith.

The positive role of tortuters and oppressors has been gravely understated, imho. Even Swineburn does not follow right through: those who cause others suffering at risk of eternal damnation themselves are the true Saints. They offer their very souls to give people the opportunity for redemption.

Personally, I have every faith that Peter will have a special appendix in his Book for those who, like Hitler, Pol Pot, et al, caused so much suffering and thus gave so many the opportunity to win their way to Salvation.